ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ********************************** Volume XXIII, Number 2 April, 1987 ********************************** -- 1 -- Marriage as a Symbol of Alienation in The Whirlpool W. Francis Browne Brooklyn College City University of New York A major theme presented in The Whirlpool1 shows how marriage as a viable institution impacts negatively on individuals living in an urban environment. In 1897, when Gissing published the story, the theme was not for him a new one. Indeed, in several of his previous novels his perspective on marriage itself is more incisive than that one finds in the works of his near or immediate contemporaries. Thus, in Dickens, Eliot, Moore, or even Hardy (if one exempts Jude the Obscure), marriage as an institution is not discussed per se but, rather, is *************************************************** Editorial Board Pierre Coustillas, Editor, University of Lille Shigeru Koike, Tokyo Metropolitan University Jacob Korg, University of Washington, Seattle Editorial correspondence should be sent to the Editor: 10, rue Gay-Lussac, 59110 La Madeleine, France, and all other correspondence to: C. C. KOHLER, 12, Horsham Road, Dorking, Surrey, RH4 2JL, England. Subscription Private Subscribers: £5.00 per annum Libraries: £8.00 per annum *************************************************** -- 2 -- accepted as part of the social and personal culmination of a series of romantic encounters or intrigues. This is not the case with Gissing. Among Gissing’s novels where the question of marriage is scrutinized to any degree, especially within a dynamic urban setting, The Odd Women comes to mind. In this story, the two older Madden sisters, for instance, never marry, but in their loneliness one, Alice, suffers from hypochondria, the other, Virginia, becomes a hopeless dipsomaniac. Monica, the youngest sister, marries a phlegmatic man, Widdowson, and they both are too insecure and egocentric to open their minds or hearts to each other, and their relationship ends tragically. The exception is Mary Barfoot, who, while not marrying, has relative financial security which enables her to pursue an individual social goal. She establishes a technical school for less privileged young women unlikely to marry, and who lack skills to function adequately in a changing society. With the assistance of Rhoda Nunn, whose superior intelligence and sense of purpose prompts her to dedicate her life to an ideal that excludes marriage, Mary fulfils herself and avoids any self-destructive habits. Everard Barfoot, her cousin, and a privileged young man of the world, feels threatened by the “new” woman, namely Rhoda Nunn, who rejects his masculine need to protect her. In The Odd Women, each of the characters is set against a background which witnesses changes in values, concerning the social and economic conditions of society, thus heightening the conflicts between men and women. Yet, the two principals, Everard Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn, at least, experience the emotions of love, while neither, from strong convictions, gives in to his feelings. Barfoot does eventually marry, but Rhoda remains a spinster, unwilling to sacrifice her beliefs by submission to male authority in matrimonial life. The differences between The Odd Women and The Whirlpool are considerable, in that the -- 3 -- former concentrates on character interrelationships in the face of social and economic crises, while in the latter, the characters are victims of a process that affects the whole complexion of society and the way that society works. And underlying The Whirlpool’s varying perspectives is Gissing’s analysis of marriage as a symbol of the alienation between men and women. This alienation coincides with the rush of technological advancement and social upheaval affecting English middle-class life during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The two principal couples in the novel, Harvey Rolfe and Alma Frothingham, and Hugh Carnaby and Sibyl Larkfield, are victims of, as well as participants (along with their friends and acquaintances) in, the new way of life. Each relationship epitomizes the disruptive contemporary trends that Gissing observed in his era. The almost total absence of romance, or love, reflects the barrenness of a society that reduces emotions to sexual liaisons and the struggle for dominance of one sex over the other. In both relationships, emphasis is on self. While the two couples live in the same world, each member of each couple sees it in his own particular way. The four principals understand that to survive in the depersonalized commercial society of which they are part, self-preservation comes before feelings of mutual concern or personal commitment to one another. The overwhelming need each character has to control his personal destiny, paradoxically, creates the attraction each has for the other. Rolfe, for example, at the outset of the novel, wants to give some purpose to his life. He is described as a well educated man, “bookish” and philosophical; his tastes (natural to such a man) are conservative. Essentially a non-activist in the cares of the world, he yearns for the quiet contemplative existence of the amateur scholar. As the novel unfolds, we learn that Rolfe is full of contradictions, which, in its way, reflects the unstable conditions of the world in which he lives. He, along with his friend, Hugh -- 4 -- Carnaby, is a man shaped by a social frame that is outmoded in the fast-paced world he meets. He is torn between the values and virtues of the past and the exciting but uncertain “busyness” of present-day society. On one level he feels himself superior to the social climbers and speculators who feed off one another to gain prestige and recognition from their betters. At the same time he is drawn to the affluent lifestyle he sees around him, even though he knows that those most visible are shallow and have no idea about the precarious nature of their positions in life. Thus, Rolfe’s rationalized philosophy, in its seeming humanism, acts as a weapon to extract what benefits he can from those he both despises and envies. Once Alma Frothingham, a beautiful erstwhile heiress, is available to him, she becomes his means of realizing his “purpose,” that is, of claiming for himself one of the chief prizes of the social élite. The contradictions in Rolfe, however, are what gives the novel its essential meaning. For example, the early portion of the book has Rolfe, prior to Alma’s fall from her former social heights, commenting on the institution of marriage and its concomitant, children. First, he considers the broken marriage of his landlord, Buncombe, whose wife has left him to pursue a singing career in “second-rate halls.” Comparing himself to Buncombe, he says, that while having “run through follies innumerable” himself in his youth, he had not been “hampered” by marriage: “Sometimes,” he wonders, “by a freak of imagination he pictured himself a married man, imprisoned with wife and children amid these leagues of dreary, inhospitable brickwork, and a great horror fell upon him” (26). This section having to do with Buncombe and his wife serves, in its way, as an adumbration of what later happens to Rolfe in his relationship with Alma. Second, Rolfe’s seeming disdain for marriage contrasts with another ideal, the matrimonial -- 5 -- condition of his friend Basil Morton, even though he scorns it in principle. His implied comparison between the modern urban marriage of “misery,” as exemplified in Buncombe’s, Wager’s and Abbott’s relationships, and the old-fashioned idealized relationship found in the rural environment of the Mortons, shows a nodding tolerance for the latter, mainly because of where the couple live — in the country — and the apparently submissive nature of the country wife, as seen in Morton’s spouse. A third contradiction in Rolfe that heightens the conflict within him is his seeming lack of regard for children. After having received a letter from his friend Morton, in which the latter mildly complains about his domestic problems, Rolfe responds in a supercilious fashion: “All domestic matters,” he asserts, “were a trial to his nerves”: It seemed to him an act of unaccountable folly to marry a woman from whom one differed diametrically on subjects that lay at the root of life; and of children he could hardly bring himself to think at all, so exasperating the complication they introduced into social problems which defied common-sense. He disliked children; fled the sight and sound of them in most cases, and, when this was not possible, regarded them with apprehension, anxiety, weariness, anything but interest (20) [Italics mine]. Over and again in the early chapters of the novel, the reader receives this lament from Rolfe. When such words as “dislike children,” “fled the sight and sound of them,” “regarded them with apprehension, anxiety,” etc., are used to identify Rolfe as the consummate bachelor and cynic, they also presage what will mock him in his later marriage to Alma, and as father to their child. Rolfe, a man alone, self-consciously observant, aware of the chaotic society that threatens all who participate in it, really gives no clear reason as to why he dislikes children. He -- 6 -- comments on them mostly in the context of abandonment by parents who give them so little concern, and with respect to their levels of education, according to their social and economic status. For example, early in the novel he makes a reference to the tragic circumstances surrounding Wager’s abandonment of his children. Rolfe states that the forlorn husband’s frustrations were “a natural revolt against domestic bondage” (13); that Wager, on his wife’s death, should have “got rid of [the children] in some legitimate way” by having them placed in a state institution.